2
There is no darkness, not this time; for better or worse, arc-sodiums have been installed on Memory Lane. Yet the film is confused, as if the editor took a few too many drinks at lunch and forgot just how the story was supposed to go. Part of this has to do with the strange way time has been twisted out of shape: he seems to be living in the past, present, and future all at the same time.
This is how we travel, a voice says, and Jonesy realizes it is the voice he heard weeping for Marcy, for a shot. Once acceleration passes a certain point, all travel becomes time travel. Memory is the basis of every journey.
The man on the corner, old Mr I-Didn’t-Say-Anything, bends over him, asks if he’s all right, sees that he isn’t, then looks up and says, “Who’s got a cell phone? This guy needs an ambulance.” When he raises his head, Jonesy sees there’s a little cut under the guy’s chin, old Mr I-Didn’t-Say-Anything probably did it that morning without even realizing it. That’s sweet, Jonesy thinks, then the film jumps and here’s an old dude in a rusty black topcoat and a fedora hat-call this elderly dickweed old Mr What’d-l-Do. He’s wandering around asking people that. He says he looked away for a moment and felt a thump-what’d I do? He says he has never liked a big car what’d I do? He says he can’t remember the name of the insurance company, but they call themselves the Good Hands People-what’d I do? There is a stain on the crotch of his trousers, and as Jonesy lies there in the street he can’t help feeling a kind of exasperated pity for the old geezer-wishes he could tell him You want to know what you did, take a look at your pants. You did Number One, Q-E-fuckin-D.
The film jumps again. Now there are even more people gathered around him. They look very tall and Jonesy thinks it’s like having a coffin’s-eye view of a funeral. That makes him remember a Ray Bradbury story, he thinks it’s called “The Crowd,” where the people who gather at accident sites-always the same ones determine your fate by what they say. If they stand around you murmuring that it isn’t so bad, he’s lucky the car swerved at the last second, you’ll be okay. If, on the other hand, the people who make up the crowd start saying things like He looks bad or I don’t think he’s going to make it, you’ll die. Always the same people. Always the same empty, avid faces. The lookie-loos who just have to see the blood and hear the groans of the injured.
In the cluster surrounding him, just behind old Mr I-Didn’t-Say-Anything, Jonesy sees Duddits Cavell, now fully dressed and looking okay-no dogshit mustache, in other words. McCarthy is there, too. Call him old Mr I-Stand-at-the-Door-and-Knock, Jonesy thinks. And someone else, as well. A gray man. Only he’s not a man at all, not really; he’s the alien that was standing behind him while Jonesy was at the bathroom door. Huge black eyes dominate a face which is otherwise almost featureless. The saggy dewlapping elephant’s skin is tighter here; old Mr ET-Phone-Home hasn’t started to succumb to the environment yet. But he will. In the end, this world will dissolve him like acid.
Your head exploded, Jonesy tries to tell the gray man, but no words come out; his mouth won’t even open. And yet old Mr ET-Phone-Home seems to hear him, because that gray head inclines slightly.
He’s passing out, someone says, and before the film jumps again he hears old Mr What’d-I-Do, the guy who hit him and smashed his hip like a china plate in a shooting gallery, telling someone People used to say I look like Laurence Welk.
3
He’s unconscious in the back of an ambulance but watching himself, having an actual out-of-body experience, and here is something else new, something no one bothers to tell him about later: he goes into V-tach while they are cutting his pants off, exposing a hip that looks as 1 if someone had sewn two large and badly made doorknobs under it. V-tach, he knows exactly what that is because he and Carla never miss an episode of ER, they even watch the reruns on TNT, and here come the paddles, here comes the goo, and one of the EMTs is wearing a gold crucifix around his neck, it brushes Jonesy’s nose as old Mr EMT bends over what is essentially a dead body, and holy fuck he died in the ambulance! Why did no one ever tell him that he died in the fucking ambulance? Did they think that maybe he wouldn’t be interested, that maybe he’d just go Ho-hum, been there, done that, got the tee-shirt?
“Clear!” shouts the other EMT, and just before they hit him the driver looks back and he sees it’s Duddits’s Mom. Then they whack him with the juice and his body jumps, all that white meat shakin on the bone, as Pete would say, and although the Jonesy watching has no body, he feels the electricity just the same, a great big pow that lights up the tree of his nerves like a skyrocket. Praise Jesus and get-down hallelujah.
The part of him on the stretcher jumps like a fish pulled from the water, then lies still. The EMT crouched behind Roberta Cavell looks down at his console and says, “Ah, man, no, flatline, hit him again.” And when the other guy does, the film jumps and Jonesy’s in an operating room.
No, wait, that’s not quite right. Part of him’s in the OR, but the rest of him is behind a piece of glass and looking in. Two other doctors are here, but they show no interest in the surgical team’s efforts to put Jonesy-Dumpty back together again. They are playing cards. Above their heads, wavering in the airflow from a heating-vent, is the dreamcatcher from Hole in the Wall.
Jonesy has no urge to watch what’s going on behind the glass-he doesn’t like the bloody crater where his hip was, or the bleary gleam of shattered bone nosing out of it. Although he has no stomach to be sick to in his disembodied state, he feels sick to it just the same.
Behind him, one of the card-playing does says, Duddits was how we defined ourselves. Duddits was our finest hour. To which the other replies, You think so? And Jonesy realizes the docs are Henry and Pete.
He turns toward them, and it seems he’s not disembodied after all, because he catches a ghost of his reflection in the window looking into the operating room. He is not Jonesy anymore. Not human anymore. His skin is gray and his eyes are black bulbs staring out of his noseless face. He has become one of them, one of the-
One of the grayboys, he thinks. That’s what they call us, the grayboys. Some of them call us the space-niggers.
He opens his mouth to say some of this, or perhaps to ask his old friends to help him-they have always helped each other, if they could-but then the film jumps again (goddam that editor, drinking on the job) and he’s in bed, a hospital bed in a hospital room, and someone is calling Where’s Jonesy, I want Jonesy.
There, he thinks with wretched satisfaction, I always knew it was Jonesy, not Marcy. That’s death calling, or maybe Death, and I must be very quiet if I’m to avoid him, he missed me in the crowd, made a grab for me in the ambulance and missed again, and now here he is in the hospital, masquerading as a patient.
Please stop, crafty old Mr Death groans in that hideous coaxing monotone, I can’t stand it, give me a shot, where’s Jonesy, I want Jonesy. I’Il just lie here until he stops, Jonesy thinks, I can’t get up anyway, just had two pounds of metal put in my hip and it’ll be days until I’m able to get up, maybe a week.
But to his horror he realizes he is getting up, throwing the covers aside and getting out of bed, and although he can feel the sutures in his hip and across his belly straining and breaking open, spilling what is undoubtedly donated blood down his leg and into his pubic hair, soaking it, he walks across the room without a limp, through a patch of sunlight that casts a brief but very human shadow on the floor (not a grayboy now, there is that to be grateful for, at least, because the grayboys are toast), and to the door. He strolls unseen down a corridor, past a parked gumey with a bedpan on it, past a pair of laughing, talking nurses who are looking at photographs, passing them from hand to hand, and toward that droning voice. He is helpless to,top and understands that he is in the cloud. Not a redblack cloud, as both Pete and Henry sensed it, however; the cloud is gray and he floats within it, a unique particle that is not changed by the cloud, and Jonesy thinks: I’m what they were looking for, I don’t know how it can be, but I am just what they were looking for. Because… the cloud doesn’t change me?